> Section 14.36.1 of draft 7 says that if the last-byte-pos is greater
> than the current length fo the entity-body, it should be taken to be
> one less than the current length of the entity-body in bytes.
>
> While this is tolerant, it is not rigourous. One (the only?) case
> where this could happen is for a client to make an unconditional
> request for an entity that has changed (i.e., the request would fail if
> it were qualified with the appropriate validator).
Nope, Ted's comments in Paris were discussed at length when the editors
met in Palo Alto. The reason for the above rule (which I didn't know
when I was in Paris) is that it allows a resource-constrained client,
such as a palmtop viewer, to always limit its requests even when it has
no idea how large the response will be. Thus, it allows the client
to cleanly request only what it knows it can handle, and therefore may
reduce unnecessary network transfer and/or broken connections.
In other words, its a feature. :)
...Roy T. Fielding
Department of Information & Computer Science (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3425 fax:+1(714)824-4056
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/